You Should Move to New York if You Want to be a US Centenarian (aka 100+ years old)

Image from P.J.P on Flickr

I want to live to be 100. I don’t eat processed foods. I take cod liver oil daily. I exercise.

But one factor that’s working against me reaching triple digits is that I reside in Austin, Texas rather than a blue zone. A blue zone is a “demographic and/or geographic area of the world where people live measurably longer lives.” Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; and supposedly Loma Linda, California are blue zones. Let’s take a look at US Census data to identify blue zones.

What’s a centenarian?

A person who is 100 years of age or older.

How many centenarians are there in the US?

According to US Census 2010 data, there are 53,364 US centenarians. 83% of US centenarians are female–which makes me quite happy about my 2 X chromosomes.

Table 1. Number of US Centenarians

How Many Centenarians live in Your State?

See Table 2 below. Of course, California, New York, Florida, Texas & Pennsylvania have the largest total numbers of centenarians. But these states also have the largest populations. We’d expect higher total numbers of centenarians in these states. But what we want know is are there states with MORE centenarians than we’d expect to be find in that state — like a blue zone state. Basically, I’m going to guess (aka hypothesize) that centenarians are not evenly distributed throughout the US. And if I’m right, then we want to identify which states have more than their expected number of folks living over 100 years of age. A quick & dirty way to calculate the expected number of centenarians is to calculate the percent of population living in a state & multiply that percent by the total number of US centenarians. Let’s look at California as an example.

• (Pop of CA / Pop of US) * Centenarians in US = Expected Centenarians in CA
• (37,253,956 / 312,471,327) * 54,325 = 6,477

Then we compare the expected number with the actual number of centenarians in CA.

• 6,477 Expected CA Centenarians vs 5,921 Actual CA Centenarians

The next step we could do is to calculate if the difference between the expected centenarians & actual centenarians is significant. But this calculation would be moving beyond quick & dirty.

Table 2. Number of Centenarians by State: Sorted by the Difference between the Actual & Expected

Per the data above, New York & Florida both have MORE centenarians than we’d expect to be in these 2 states, whereas California and my beloved Texas have FEWER centenarians than we’d expect to be in these 2 states. To better my odds of living to over 100, I should move from Texas to New York or Florida. New York & Florida are big states, so where in these states should I move to? I actually looked at data for all counties in the US, and the top 10 counties with the largest difference between the actual number of centenarians and the expected number of centenarians were all in either New York or Florida. Hartford, Connecticut finally breaks into the list at number 12.

Table 3. 15 US Counties with the Largest Positive Difference between the Actual & Expected Number of Centenarians

Conversely, the table below contains the 15 counties with fewer centenarians than we’d expect to live in these counties. I’ve lived either in or just next door to Harris County, Bexar County & Travis County for most of my life — all 3 of which are in the table below.

Table 4. 15 US Counties with the Largest Negative Difference between the Actual & Expected Number of Centenarians

Image from Adam Jones, Ph.D. on Flickr

But I won’t be packing my bags for New York County, New York right now. As always, correlation doesn’t indicate causality. Or in this case, geographic location might not in & of itself increase my chances of living to be over 100. Maybe people who wear green hats are more likely to live in New York County, New York; and wearing a green hat makes you live longer.

Come to think of it, I’d need a hefty pay raise to afford to live in New York. And just scanning down the names of the counties in Table 3, these counties have the reputation of having high median incomes — much higher than the US average. Or maybe we should substitute ”wearing a green hat” for “making a lot of money” An interesting next step would be to look at the median incomes of these counties with the largest difference between the actual & expected number of centenarians & see if we could identify a couple of counties with low to moderate median incomes and a high difference. But I digress. And since I plan on living in Travis County, Texas for the foreseeable future, I had better continue taking my cod liver oil.

Weird Census data stuff

• Yes, the 3 different tables sum up to 3 different total US centenarians counts. For example, table 1 says that there’s 53,364 centenarians whereas table 2 (the sum of the state counts) says that there’s 54,325 centenarians.  Differences like these happen when you compare different tables of Census data.
• I used the original population count data. There were revised population numbers for some states & some counties, but to just keep everything simple, I used the original Census 2010 population count data.